(Image: Chapter 9, Pelanca City)

Chapter 9 is now up and ready to read. Bennie finally gets to see Pelanca and so do you, via both her description and the chapter picture above. There's so much I love in this chapter: inside jokes, a first glimpse of a character, and so much of my 8-year-old self's imagination.

This is the first chapter picture of a small few that I did not redo for the relaunch. I like the original too much. I drew it across three sheets of computer paper (I'm so high-tech) back around Thanksgiving, 2006.

But the concept of Pelanca actually predates these books. Its actual creation date was closer to 1996 than 2006, as was Gemini's homeworld, Dwendol. Back in those days I drew more than I wrote down, and often the stories I made up were drawn out on my Magna Doodle as I went along, rather than actually sketched out. If any written form of the Tales of Dwendol survives I don't know about it, but those stories still exist in my mind, and some of them inspired my early-teenage gel pen drawings:

(Image: Concept from The Tales of Dwendol. Belenedain, a fairy-sorceress with butterfly wings, stands on a mountain above a forest, with a phoenix. Image rendered on black paper with gel pens.)

Pelanca evolved a great deal, from an underground city on Dwendol to its own plane of reality, enabling interstellar travel without space ships, and I've always loved the fact that these crazy things my childish mind came up with found a home in my novels.

So keep your old concepts. Don't scrap anything; just put it away. You might find it fits right another day.